>Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients.
Be snobby about cake ingredients.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
Sorry, I couldn't find a good link to describe the effect but did see numerous websites mentioning that alcohol can worsen allergy symptoms.
My allergist informed me that alcohol dilates the blood vessels allowing more allergens to pass thru. My anecdotal evidence is that I do seem to suffer from more food allergies when I drink alcohol. Foods that I have a mild allergy to become seem to be more problematic when I drink.
[1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...
The linked article explains it quite clearly, it’s a good read.
Is this a troll? I thought it was pretty well understood that processed food is linked with eating and nutritional issues. I have personally found a strong correlation between food quality and the lack of gums, modified starches, and other artificial ingredients.
A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.
I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.
I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.
Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.
Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.
Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.
Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
At least no almonds got jerked off in the process.
People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird!
I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either.
Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
News alert: the cholesterol hypothesis is dead, but many people, like parent poster here, cannot let go:
https://www.sott.net/article/441076-The-cholesterol-hypothes...
Most of the world's agriculture concerns growing commodity crops to feed animals - 'big beef'. This is big business and the source of all hatchet jobs on Ancel Keys. Their message is simple, you don't need fruit and vegetables, you need steak and butter!
Find me one centenarian that got there by eating a diet heavy in saturated fats. Just one!!!
If you want your arteries blocked and if heart disease is considered advantageous, then your assertion (without sources) is correct. I think it is best that you chug down that steak and butter, and I will stick to food that contains fibre.
> I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting.
This does depend on the type of cake you're baking and your expectations of 'better' though.
Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.
Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker.
> some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker
Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.
Blind testing is missing the point - you're not trying to emulate some perfect standard. The little imperfections and variances in the result are the value.
Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?
But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible.
Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.
Frosting is a different topic - totally agree there, but I haven't seen any blind taste tests on that one.
The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
95% of bakeries are using a box mix and a packet of jello pudding. That's the secret.
The masses sustain Hostess by buying enough of their atrocious boxed "cakes" and cookies. I really wouldn't trust their taste buds.
If your argument is, "if making cakes for the masses, boxed is fine," sure, I don't disagree. My argument is that I hang out with folks that do care about that kind of thing and basically never go to the middle aisles of a grocery store - that crowd will appreciate baked with straightforward ingredients. Flour, sugar, actual cocoa powder, yeast, whatever.
Could be a "New Coke"[1] thing, where people just like the one with more sugar. There's a reason food companies pack the stuff into everything - it (usually) works.
You will be surprised to learn that brands have very differently tasting products developed for different markets. Often even under the same name.
This is an issue with Kellogg's cereal and Lay's potato chips in China. They purport to be available. But they're not the same product.
I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a good idea; it entirely defeats the purpose of branding.
It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that.
If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really.
Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar.
Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result.
Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well.
Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit.
Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on.
Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting.
I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it.
Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era.
The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.
Respect for working in a bakery, just hope you haven't got too many burn scars on your forearms from doing long night shifts. I am in broad agreement with you and I appreciate the difficulties of making a consistent product, particularly when there are variables in temperature, seasonal availability of ingredients, lots of machinery to keep running and workers that are probably taking a bit more than cake to see their shifts through.
In the UK, as far a cakes are concerned, you either have a 'bought one' or something you make from scratch yourself. There is no in-between and a cake mix would be frowned on by middle class snobs as 'having cheated'. Or, failing that, taken as an insult. A 'bought one' would be entirely understandable, and what you might expect for birthday celebrations, at home or in the workplace. But a cake mix?
A home made cake is 'proof of work' and the use of a cake mix just undermines it. Approximately the same amount of time is spent in the kitchen and the oven is on for the same amount of time, plus there is the same amount of washing up.
Advertising these processed foods started a lot earlier in America than anywhere else. There are geographical challenges that make this understandable. But, over time, the food companies coalesced into a dozen gigantic mega-corporations and brands that once stood for quality and no adulterated ingredients (from the days before the FDA) now stand for adulterated ingredients.
In the UK we used to have Quaker owned confectionery companies such as Cadburys where the original product was all about health, happy workers and all these good things. They automated processes because they were ideologically against slavery. But, generations on, with the likes of Cadburys owned by the likes of Kraft or Nestle, it isn't like that. The milk and cocoa content goes down, the sugar and palm oil goes up. The Fairtrade cocoa goes and the 'Rainforest Alliance' cocoa comes in, and you can guess the ethics of the latter are not to the standards of the former.
None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model, to never make any profit since they have these extra costs that have to be paid to tax havens.
Back to stupid British snobbery, I would prefer one of your mass-made cakes any day over something that has been made by a snobby Brit as the 'ultimate in cake', where you can't just enjoy it, you have to express to the baker that every mouthful is like the greatest, most orgasmic experience in the history of the universe, for which you are eternally grateful. In these scenarios, you daren't wolf the cake down as that would be disrespectful, and you daren't ask for anything more than the thinnest slice since any more would be deemed greedy.
This part interests me. I have no idea what seals of approval are worthwhile or not. I just see that they are printed on the package and assume it counts for something. Is there some controversy relater to cocoa in this case?
Getting a fair trade certification requires a supply chain inspection, and in theory, would not be possible to get for producers which have child slavery in the supply chain. Though of course, supply chain inspections are complicated and I believe this is by no means perfect (nothing is).
Rainforest Alliance certified has nothing to do with ethics in treatment of the humans involved in the supply chain, just environmental impact.
Having been to a lot of kids birthday parties recently, I’m firmly on the side of “home made cake”. Shop bought cake has a distinctive taste and texture which I really don’t like. If I made a cake at home and it ended up tasting like something from the supermarket I’d consider it a failure.
If the US can make you pay the income tax difference when living abroad then I fail to see why we can't do the same for companies using these kinds of schemes.
What do you think would happen to tax revenues if all the Starbuckses disappeared?
Do you have a source? I really haven't met anyone using cake mixes to make cakes.
But if you mean they use butter instead of milking a cow directly and producing the butter then yes, they use processed food.
This matters when you are trying to sell a product, not so much when you are cooking for friends and family as long as you get into the ballpark which isn't really that hard. Little variances and surprises just make home cooking more interesting.
Grandmas should not be cooking cakes from boxes of cake dust, they should be using flour and producing a cake that tastes like it was cooked by a grandma. That is the natural order of things.
Being made with traditional methods and ingredients, is per se a virtue. If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. Home cooking is great because it was cooked at home using the limited equipment and ingredients of a home kitchen that give it a natural and traditional taste.
And the odds that ingredients found in nature are ideal ingredients by sheer chance are about 0%. And we haven't been making cakes long enough to for evolution to turn natural into ideal.
Let people like what they like.
If the fries are bad, I definitely would. I might not complain where the grandma could hear, but food doesn't magically become good because a grandma cooks it. I've had plenty of godawful meals cooked up by grandmas.
Work isn't inherently valuable. We value the results of that work.
Made my day. I would bet you my monthly salary, if I wouldn't have to suspect - based on the quoted sentence - that your taste buds are already fully dorked up based on the crap you put into your cake hole from years of industrialized and processed food-simulacrum.
> Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise
It actually isn't once you understand a few basic principals. If you need a box of cake dust to bake, you cannot bake. That's it. And if grandma needs that, she actually never learned to bake. Baking is so damn simple for 90+ percent of cakes. Yes, if you want to get all fancy - we are talking a different ball game. But the sames can be said about cooking for fine dining.
> To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience
Just not true. Learn the basic principles (share of dry vs wet ingredients and such base level things) and not just try copying a recipe, basically cargo culting.
About the taste of things: When I learned what actual food tastes like it was in many ways interesting. First it was very often quite disappointing. Because a lot of things did not taste how I would have expected they would taste. Take strawberries for example. They did not taste as sweet, not as "intense", bland even. But over time, I got to learn the different tastes of different varieties of strawberries and how rich they are, a richness, that I never knew. My taste buds "just" had to unlearn the overly intense way industry does with aroma and shit.
I had to learn what strawberries (and many other things) really taste, compared to the artificially aromatised crap the industry is telling is is "strawberry flavor".
Nowadays, with over 100 varieties of tomatoes for example in our own greenhouses, I enjoy a vastness of taste variations when eating a simple salad. Or baked tomatoes from the oven. I would never, never trade that for industrialized crap.
> Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives
Poor every day people. I pity them. And yes: I might definitely be a snob, when it comes to what goes into my body. My body is the only one I got - why should I treat it to sub par crap.
I'm sorry, but this reads like a piece of Ignatius Reilly dialog.
Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions.
Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.